Residents of Brooklyn’s East Flatbush neighborhood will soon have a new place to swim, run, gather and learn across 74,000 square feet in the heart of an area known as “Little Haiti” for its large Haitian population.
On Monday, Mayor Eric Adams and other city officials are set to break ground on a $141 million recreation center named after Shirley Chisholm, the late congresswoman and presidential candidate from Brooklyn who was the first Black woman ever elected to Congress.
The facility, originally announced in 2020 by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, will be built at the Nostrand Playground site at 3002 Foster Ave. Officials say the center will feature multiple fitness areas, an indoor pool, a walking track, a commercial teaching kitchen, and space for a variety of programming, as well as a “media lab” dedicated to late community activist and business leader Roy Hastick, who founded the Caribbean American Chamber of Commerce and Industry in 1985, more than a decade after emigrating from his native Grenada.
Construction is expected to be completed in 2025. Partial funding for the center came from capital dollars reallocated from the NYPD budget in 2021 under de Blasio.
As part of a new “design-build” initiative from the city — in which design and construction firms collaborate under one contract — the center will be finished two years earlier than it would have under the old “lowest bidder” system, according to the office of State Assemblymember Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, who represents parts of East Flatbush and serves as chair of the Brooklyn Democratic Party.
The facility could prove to be a pillar in the neighborhood, whose 67th precinct experienced a spike in shootings during the pandemic, NYPD data shows. While those numbers have been decreasing in the last few years, some experts say community centers can help keep young people off the streets and away from violence.
Other local officials slated to join Mayor Adams at Monday’s ceremony…
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